Tony Blair today issued a rallying to the Party he used to lead today, saying Labour's anti-Semitism problem needed to be "gripped and dealt with"

In a radio interview, this morning, conducted whilst on visit to Washington D.C., former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, lay the blame for the UK Labour Party’s widely reported problem with anti-Semitism squarely at the feet of Jeremy Corby and the current Party leadership.

Mr. Blair, himself a former leader of the Labour Party, told journalist Steve Inskeep that he, and others like him, had been raising the issue for the past three years, in the hope that it would be properly dealt with. He went on to explain how Labour’s problem with anti-Semitism had developed:

“What has happened with the British Labour Party is that a strain of the far left has taken it over; in circumstances where, when I was leader, these people were very much on the fringes of the Labour Party and now the new leadership has brought them in.”

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This was not to say according to Mr. Blair that the majority of the Labour Party was anti-Semitic. He made a point of telling, the American audience, that the vast majority of Labour MPs, many of whom had first being elected during his Premiership, were horrified by this.

Mr. Blair then issued a call to action saying anti-Semitism within the Labour Party “has not been gripped and dealt with and it needs to be gripped and dealt with.”